At the moment, the grandest and most ethically ambitious architecture in the city — the green, living roof of the new convention centre — resembles a hair plug job. There’s a lot of bald up there.

It’s sparse, but growth proceeds. They started planting it two weeks ago, and crews are working their way across the six-acre roof sewing and digging in more than 750,000 plants. A green blush appeared on the canvas of the roof’s dark-brown growing medium of pumice and organic matter.

A Connecticut architecture firm that designed Atlanta’s 1180 Peachtree Tower and Four Seasons Place, a 3.1 million-square-foot complex in Malaysia, is set to “make a new heart of Oklahoma City” with a Devon Energy skyscraper.

Larry Nichols, chief executive officer of Devon, said Friday that Pickard Chilton was hired from among seven internationally-accomplished architecture firms the company has interviewed the past several months.

The University of Pennsylvania plans to announce today that Marilyn Jordan Taylor, FAIA, a long-time partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, will be the new dean of its School of Design.

Taylor, a pioneering female architect widely respected for her leadership in complex urban projects and civic initiatives, joined SOM 35 years ago. She was elected partner in 1985 and in 2001 became the firm’s first female chairman.

Only a few years ago, anyone who suggested growing plants on a roof might have been dismissed as a complete crank. Not any more.

Sedum on roofThe Botanical Roof Garden, Augustenborg, Sweden

Green roofs have started to appear on new buildings up and down the country with remarkable speed. Most feature a thin layer of the amazingly resilient hardy succulent plant, the sedum. Several different kinds are used, with leaves in a variety of different colours: yellow, green, red and bronze.

Grass and turf roofs are still not that common in this country. It’s a different story in Scandinavia, which has a long tradition of using turf, not least because it makes perfect practical sense: the layer of soil and grass insulates against cold winter weather, and protects the roof from wind damage.

On a recent evening, architect J. Meejin Yoon sat in her Leather District loft sewing mats of turf together. “I just have one more stitch,” she said.more stories like this

Several squares of grass, each about the size of an album cover, had arrived in a cooler a few days earlier. Yoon had dutifully sewn them together to create a large panel, part of a vertical garden installation called “Parti Wall, Hanging Green” to welcome the American Institute of Architects conference that begins in Boston today.